Doc

Don't forget all the fancy bread ..... Italian, Rye, pumpernickel ..... and real butter. Yeah real butter is bad for you, but it's only one meal. Hey! I like the idea of French onion soup ..... one of my favorites until I burn the hell out of my mouth when the molten cheese sticks to my lip. Let's hear a bit more about those desserts. Anyone up for one of those 8" high carrot cakes with whatever that great frosting is that they put on those?

Sounds like a good opportunity to sharpen up your still-hunting skills. Dress in all kind of layers and seek out sheltered areas. Unlike a bow, with muzzleloaders and crossbows, you don't have to worry about bulky clothing disturbing your shooting, so you can put on as much as you think you might need. The slight, slow movement of still hunting will help keep you warm. Most likely you will have the woods all to yourself.

There is no excuse for pointing any gun at anyone (or making excuses for anyone else doing so), regardless of what assumptions you may be making about how disabled and unloaded the gun may be. As I said before, gun safety should be used without even thinking about it. If that part of a persons hunter training safety course didn't take, there is nothing wrong with it being reinforced when someone is not paying attention to a safety rule so damned basic.

You are assuming that the gun was not loaded. That was not stated as a fact nor was anyone at the time in a position to determine that. I think given the situation as it was explained here, only a complete idiot would go up against an irrational acting, armed woman walking through a store (any store) screaming obscenities. Perhaps it would take an even bigger idiot to stand there giggling at the situation and considering it "entertainment". Don't confuse prudent care and forethought for cowardice. But anyway, what are you suggesting? ....... that someone should have instantly wrestled her to the floor and ripped the gun from her hands to prove their toughness? The only thing being proven would be how to be escorted to the police car in handcuffs, charged with assault. I think you may have missed the point of what people were talking about when it comes to the idea of "defending self, family and the country". Now relative to when to call the cops, and whether any laws were being broken, I believe that it is not our place to decide what is legal and what is not. My thought is that a call should have been made describing the whacked-out actions and demeanor of the woman waving a gun and acting a bit bizarre inside a store full of people so that the proper authorities can decide whether their attention and action or investigation is warranted. Give them the details of what is going on, and let them worry about what to do about it.

Saw one sitting in one of the blue heron nests a bunch of years back in the town of Bristol in Ontario County While a bunch of herons flew around making a heck of racket. It was likely dining on eggs or heron chicks.

Sometimes I think you post just to get attention. No...... actually I'm sure of it. There is no way that you could possibly think that gun safety has right places and wrong places to be practiced. If gun safety is not second nature and practiced as a trained-in behavior then obviously the hunter safety training didn't take. I wouldn't tolerate that kind of irresponsible gun handling for a second without strongly objecting. And then to be absolutely ok with a member of your own family having the muzzle of a gun waved in her face ..... well, what can be said about that? This is a store with both the guns and the ammo there in the same place. Why would any sane person think that that is a time or place to throw gun safety rules out the window. Sometimes I wonder why the gun accidents are not higher in number with some of the attitudes of contempt for safety that are out there. And as for the first paragraph, what you are mistaking for "entertainment" is really morbid curiosity. These days, that isn't really all that brilliant a reaction when someone comes marching into a store waving a gun and shouting obscenities.

If it takes an expert to tell the difference, the effort is wasted on me. I have had "un-aged" venison, "properly aged" venison (by a professional), and "improperly aged" venison. It all tasted the same to me except for one of those categories.....and guess which one that was. Damn that stuff was rank and even at the risk of offending my host, I left the rest of it on the plate to be thrown away. In his attempt to "age" the meat, he might as well have just taken it to the dump. So my recommendation, if you don't know what you are doing, turn that critter into little frozen packages as quickly as you possibly can and forget you ever heard the term "aging". I'm sure there are beneficial differences or slaughterhouses and professional butchers wouldn't bother doing it with beef and such. But I am also convinced that there are a lot of people who claim they are aging the meat and all they are doing is turning it into foul-tasting, half rotted, meat that every dog in the neighborhood wishes they could roll in.

Anybody have any idea what the actual tally is for this year so far?

Somebody want to tell me about wild boar meat? I have heard all different kinds of opinions, but the majority of what I have heard is that it is not very good. By the way, I didn't mention above, but we did get a very tasty moose from Ontario Canada a bunch of years ago that would rival some of the better beef.

Time to get on your feet and start still-hunting. Get that blood circulating. After opening day, still-hunting has always been the most productive method for me. Sometimes you still get cold but usually proper clothing and that very slight movement is just enough to keep me warm.

Most deer can survive and even do rather well on 3 legs. In fact one of the fattest deer I ever took was a three-legged doe. She even had a fawn that year. Actually if they have to become amputees, the front leg would be the best to lose instead of one of the rear power legs. However, I can't even begin to imagine the frustration with the gun problem with a huge "gift-buck" offering itself up to you.

My idea of aging is to sling it into the truck bed as soon as it comes off the hill and drive over to the processor. Usually before the day is out, I am on my way back to the processor to pick up the packages of meat. Yeah, I know that is heresy, but I have no walk-in coolers to do the hanging the right way, and I am still remembering the old days when it was standard practice to hang the deer from a tree limb in the front yard where it can freeze and thaw and freeze and thaw and dangle in the sun. And then people tried to call that food.....lol. So depending on the luck of the weather, your venison could taste somewhere between reasonable and rotted garbage. I have never had bad venison since we started the instant processing. Even when we were processing our own, they were reduced to little packages before nightfall.

This was a great year for having that nice white background that makes deer stand out in contrast. Not everything went bad. It often makes the difference between you seeing the deer first, or the deer seeing you first.

I know you can file a lawsuit over just about anything, but in this case I doubt it would ever see the inside of a courtroom.

The best: pheasant The weirdest: snapping turtle burgers ..... started but not finished. The second weirdest: pigeons at age 11, harvested in the hay loft of the barn with my homemade longbow. That was my first hunting harvest.

Perhaps if times got tough enough, and death by starvation started to look inevitable, I might resort to eating a coyote. With my luck that would probably wind up being one with a severe case of mange that had just finished rolling in a juicey, sun-ripened, dead woodchuck. But until then, I think I will pass.

You guys had better stay out of range of Runnings in Canandaigua. It can have the same effect.

Now, just to be clear...... Did you mess up those shots, or did God mess them up. Maybe the divine-intervention mode was turned off when those shots were taken. I'm sorry. I apologize. I couldn't help myself ..... The devil made me do it.

I don't know.... today we worry so much about the trauma of such pictures on the tender psyche of children that we tend to shelter them right to death. Sometimes a simple but graphic picture adds to the reality that carrying a weapon offers the potential for some real nasty consequences when done incorrectly. It is true that the realism of news events and video games and movies has likely de-sensitized kids these days. But still that image of that guy hanging by his foot on the fence, with the blood and meat flashed up there while the topic of the correct way to cross fences really, was a very powerful reinforcement of the subject. You can bore a kid into an unconscious stare with the drone of a long lecture on gun safety, but flash an image like that up and you instantly have their attention back. That old saying that a picture is worth a thousand words is never truer than in that situation. BUT.... You know what would happen if that was done today. There would be all kinds of parents picketing and jamming the school office about how their precious child was traumatized by such vile images.

I often wonder exactly when deer hunting turned into an animal husbandry project. You go through a thread like this one, and you would think everybody is hunting a domestic deer herd. Apparently the game today is manage the genetic composition of the herd, control the diet of the deer, and do all of these activities with the intent of growing big antlers to display on a wall. Well, everybody is certainly free to do whatever they believe in, but I have always hunted deer as I find them. They are wild animals that belong to everyone. They do not feed from a trough or come into the barn each night. Most of the fences that remain on our property or the state land that I also hunt, you can simply step over. I don't pick and choose, or think that I am having any great impact on these hundreds of acres of real actual wild deer. I don't spend hundreds (perhaps thousands) of dollars playing farmer and trying to grow a trophy. That probably would be fun, but has nothing to do with hunting as I have always defined it. I simply hunt deer and enjoy every minute of it as a time honored traditional activity of recreation that our family has casually enjoyed for generations. Do I want to have to worry about deer farming and trying to arrange a "crop" of deer such that I can grow big antlers? ...... Not really. I simply hunt based on existing opportunities. Am I doing it right and everyone else is doing it wrong? .... not at all. But I do try to keep it real and understand that we are dealing with wild animals where 99% of the results depend simply on Mother Nature no matter how we try to alter and control things. And, for me, that's exactly the way I like it. If I want to raise my meat, I will most likely opt for black angus. That at least is something I can realistically have full control over. So, before all the hue and cry arises, let me say that I am not trying to persuade anyone of anything. I am just commenting that we don't all look at hunting in the same way. I hunt wild animals as nature presents them to me. My focus is on changing myself to hunt better, not change the herd to make my hunting easier or more productive. And so while these threads about deer management are interesting, I always have this nagging thought in the back of my head that perhaps we are bit over-impressed with our actual abilities to micro-manage and control wild herds. And all the opposing opinions on these kinds of management topics tend to back up that notion that maybe our thinking and actions are a bit over-reaching our actual abilities. I may be wrong, but I really think that we might benefit from relaxing just a bit and just hunt.

Hunting has become a one day event for a lot of hunters these days. In some cases it is a half-day annual event. The days of the overflowing state land parking lots and the lines of cars parked along the roads seems to have ended. I imagine that depends on where you hunt, but around my neck of the woods, that's the way it has been for quite a few years. You know, we are so busy patting ourselves on the back for our improving safety records. I think it is simply that we are having fewer shootings because there are fewer hunters actually out there actively hunting.

Back in the olden days, I took my hunter safety training the Naples Central bus garage. And we were required to fire some .22 caliber rifles. One other thing that I recall about that course was a slide show that actually showed a deceased hunter hanging by his foot from a fence after having shot himself crossing the fence without abiding by safe gun handling practices. There were several other gruesome pics of hunting accidents. I have always said that these explicit pictures left a lifelong imprint of safety on me that was so much more powerful than some abstract mention of hunting accidents. Now just think a minute about how things have changed over the years. Loaded firearms, being possessed and actually fired on school grounds. Today, it is likely that you would not even be allowed to hang up a poster announcing a gun safety course somewhere else (especially if there is a picture of a gun on the poster). That was a mere 60 years ago.

By golly, perhaps for the very first time, we found something that we actually agree on.....lol.

The guy loves to get his butt kicked. It's pretty funny.

Another crying whining compost from the whimpering left. It is turning hilarious as this guy has become so distraught to the point of being broken and obsessive. It is truly comical to watch.